I’m Sorry Grandma

“A lot can change in twenty years,” I thought to myself, as I brushed away the dust, revealing the faint remnants of the number 3 by where the front door of my old home used to be. The now decrepit house that I used to live in was hardly recognizable anymore. A huge gaping hole and collapsed debris comprised what used to be a roof, moss covered what remained of the walls, if you could even call the structure “walls” at this point, and nature had consumed the interior. I considered turning back when the smell hit me, but I had to face it. I had to return to where it all began. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I wanted to do good. I wanted to save lives, but life doesn’t always play out how you want it to.

As I slowly entered through the doorway, several rats scurried away into the darkness. I paused for a minute, and pulled the locket from my pocket. It was a gold heart-shaped locket that my grandmother had given me as a high school graduation present. “Let this locket contain my love for you. I carried it with me through my darkest times. I don’t think I would have survived Auschwitz without it. May it guide you as well,” she told me when she handed it to me. I don’t think this is what she envisioned at the time.

I was 16 years old when I received my acceptance letter from Princeton University to study chemistry. I was expelled my first year when I was caught stealing lab equipment and chemicals to supply my own laboratory in the basement of my parent’s house. My parents were furious with me, but I didn’t want to wait. I didn’t want to wait through the never ending labyrinth that is academia to earn my PhD before I could fulfil my destiny. You see, I was always told I was a prodigy. I was told that I was a genius; that I could save the world someday, and I believed them. I had received every academic achievement and more, shit, I was accepted to Princeton University at 16 years old. Of course I believed them.

My goal was to cure disease. Not just cancer, but all disease. My grandfather died from heart disease when I was just a small child and my grandmother was diagnosed with stage 4 liver cancer earlier that year. The doctors told us there was nothing we could do, but I never accepted that as an answer. My expulsion didn’t bother me because I had already stolen enough equipment to build my own laboratory. Maybe if I had taken it a little slower, I wouldn’t have been caught, but I didn’t waste any time grappling with the past. After a year or two in the basement, my parents kicked me out. I had just turned 18 years old and they had enough of me “wasting my potential.” Thankfully, I had made good money investing the bitcoin that I received from selling my own synthesized LSD on the dark web, so I bought a small house and moved my laboratory there to work in peace.

The first few years were not very fruitful but I remained in good spirit. Failed experiment after failed experiment, but I didn’t give up. My parents would call about once a month for the first year to try to “get my life back on track,” but I would hear none of it. I was on a mission. My father eventually stopped speaking to me, but my mother would still call on my birthday. I always told her the same thing. “I’m going to save the world so nobody will ever have to suffer like grandma and grandpa ever again.” She would pretend to understand because she loved me, but I knew she didn’t. She wanted her prodigy son who was accepted to Princeton at 16 back. She wanted me to make something of my life. She didn’t understand that I wanted the same thing.

After 10 years of failure, I began to lose hope. I would clutch the heart-shaped locket tightly and gently kiss the picture of my young grandmother smiling back at me with her family before every experiment. I whispered the same thing every time. “I’m going to do it. This time it will work. This time I will end disease.” But it never worked. Whenever I would think of giving up, I would open the locket and look into my grandmother’s eyes. “I’m doing this for you,” I would say. Swallowing what was left of my pride, I continued my work, despite my constant failure.

This was my life at the time. As bleak as it may have seemed then, I would give anything to have it back. Failure was the norm, until one day, when for the first time, the rat didn’t die after the injection. I was careful to not get too excited, but I knew I was on to something. This time I had synthesized a virus designed to work with the immune system to fight alongside the body rather than against the body. A week later, the rat’s tumor had disappeared. I repeated the experiment on more rats with whom I had inflicted with various diseases. Malaria, Diabetes, Syphilis, Polio, and more… All cured within a week. I shouted with joy and kissed my grandmother’s locket. “I knew I could do it! I knew it! I couldn’t have done it without you grandma!” I yelled excitedly.

Unfortunately, I was a disgraced drop out with no permits, approvals, or anything to run my laboratory, and I was working with many highly illegal chemicals and compounds, so I could not just simply publish my work. Over the years, however, I had developed a relationship with a Chinese supplier with whom I used to source precursor for the LSD that I synthesized to fund my laboratory, as well as other chemicals for my experiments that I could not purchase legally. I was careful not to disclose too many details, but I told them that I needed help to further test my experiments and that I would pay them whatever it cost. Without even saying the words, they knew exactly what I meant. Human trials. I sent them $10 million in bitcoin and flew out to meet them in China.

It wasn’t difficult at all to smuggle a few vials of my virus onto the plane. After all, the TSA is a joke, and my Chinese contact had already greased the Chinese customs agent for me. Before I knew it, I was in an underground laboratory in China preparing my first human trial. I could see the fear in the woman’s eye as she sat huddled in the corner of her small cell. The stench from the waste bucket permeated the room. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you,” I said in Chinese to the woman. She only grew more fearful as I approached. I didn’t dare ask how long she had been imprisoned for, but her ghastly appearance said more than any words could. I injected the tuberculosis sample into her blood.

In the next cell lay a man, or what once was a man. He was so skinny, I could see every bone in his body. “Cancer, only few month to live,” my contact said to me in broken English. I nodded. In the third cell, a young woman lay crying. She looked unusually healthy, not like the broken fragmented souls of the dying prisoners I had just seen. She muttered something to me in a language that I did not understand. I can only assume she was begging for help. “Find her escape North Korea. We take her for you. Diabetes,” my contact told me. I couldn’t help but feel some sympathy for her, but I was working for the greater good of humanity. “Satisfied, you?” My contact asked. “Yes, thank you,” I replied as I sent the second half of my payment in bitcoin from my laptop.

The next day, I returned to the laboratory to begin my experiment. One by one, I visited the poor souls whom I had met the day before and injected them with my virus. “I will save you,” I told them each. I truly believed that I would save them. After each injection, I touched my grandmother’s locket to their foreheads and whispered a small prayer. I wasn’t particularly religious, but I asked my grandmother’s spirit to bless these lost, forgotten souls, and prayed that my experiments would be successful. I carefully monitored each patient for the following week, and just as I had hoped, it worked. IT WORKED! The tumor in the dying man was gone, the diabetes was cured, the tuberculosis, gone! The three patients developed a minor cough soon after, but side effects were expected. The frail old man with the tumor developed pneumonia and succumbed to his conditions soon after, but his tumor was still cured. The other two patients recovered with no complications. I was ecstatic. I had done it! I was going to be a hero. I prepared my documents, samples, and proof, and prepared to head back home, when I too developed a small cough. It soon progressed to the worst fever I had ever had and I was forced to remain in China for a few extra weeks, but I too recovered. “A small hiccup in the greatest achievement of mankind,” I thought.

When I returned home, I cracked open two Coca-Cola’s. One for me and one for my grandmother. I set the can down on the table in front of her locket at the seat next to me. I don’t particularly care for Coke, but she loved it. She drank one almost every single day of her life, and I was going to celebrate with her. I turned on the TV and prepared to relax in my success. “We did it, Grandma. We did it.” I exclaimed, gently touching the beautiful gold heart shaped locket beside me. “New virus discovered in Wuhan, China,” the headline read on the news. “Shit,” I thought, “Well, it’s a small cost to pay for a new era of mankind. An era with no more cancer, no more price gouging of insulin, no more suffering like my grandparents had to suffer.”

It got worse before it got better. A global pandemic. At first, they thought the disease came from a bat. Most people didn’t take it seriously, and it spread across the entire world, practically upending the entire global economy. “I would have to wait until this passed before I could publish my work,” I thought. It didn’t pass as quickly as I had hoped, but eventually a vaccine was developed and the world began to slowly return to normal. We were in the clear, and I prepared to publish my work to the world… anonymously of course, I would not bear the blame of a pandemic, including so many deaths. I clutched my grandmother’s locket tightly as I began to write up my letter to the world, including my apology for all the death and suffering of the last two years. I had almost finished, when I got the alert on my cell phone. “NEW MUTATION OF COVID-19, 99.99% FATALITY RATE. MANDATORY LOCKDOWN EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY!”

Chaos ensued. Looters ransacked every store and killers roamed freely, as any semblance of law and order collapsed immediately. I fled into the woods as the world fell apart around me. You can fill in the blanks of the following twenty years, but here we are, twenty years later, at the now abandoned, mostly collapsed house that I used to call home. The house that I had originally synthesized this virus in. The house where it all began. “I’m sorry, Grandma,” I whispered into the locket, as a tear rolled down my face. “I’m so sorry.”